Rock'n'roll had always had a fascination with the juvenile delinquent, but
Sex Pistols certainly brought it
to a whole new dimension. They seemed to exist only to wreak havoc, generate
scandal and elicit outrage.
Johnny "Rotten" Lydon screamed like a hostile, rabid beast, while his
cohorts unleashed a primal, feral fury. They were not as gifted as the
Rolling Stones, but they were their equivalent in the new "swinging London"
of the 1970s.
Anarchy In The UK (1976) and God Save The Queen had clear
political ovvertones, although their album,
Never Mind The Bollocks (1977), was more genuinely "anthemic" in the
tradition of Rolling Stones, Who and Animals. They lasted only one year,
but it was enough to feed a punk frenzy throughout the kingdom.
(Translated by Giorgio Curcetti)

Malcolm McLaren, who had the opportunity to be noted both in England and in the U.S.A. for some
provocatory happenings, organized in 1971 a gathering point for non-conformist youngsters in a London
boutique owned by him. It was there where the original nucleus of the Sex Pistols formed, with Glen
Matlock on bass, Steve Jones on guitar and Paul Cook on drums. The band was joined by the end of
1975 by a true street hooligan, Johnny "Rotten" Lydon, as singer. McLaren, who witnessed in New York the birth of
the New Wave, brought the Ramones to England, whom already created scandal in the U.S.A. The Sex
Pistols were inspired by that movement, but since the very beginning they interpreted it related to the
social and economic disaster in Great Britain: where the Ramones took the mickey out of society
recounting the adventures of middle class adolescents with the same aplomb with which the Beach Boys
sang beach parties, the Sex Pistols started screaming vehemently the nihilism and the almost beastly
hostility of the young English outsiders. The band debouted live at the 100 Club the 30th of March 1976.
Their savage live shows elicited immediately some success. Thousands of youngsters recognised
themselves on the spot in the ultra-violent gunshots of their songs. Their outrageous performances of
musical illiteracy, of social indifference and maniacal perversion went hand in hand with the mood of
a generation forgotten both by their parents and their politicians. The Sex Pistols became a symbol of
provocation and sarcasm towards the decrepit and ruinous England, just like the Rolling Stones had been
for the "Swinging London" in the sixties.

The 20th of September 1976, at the first punk festival, the group found a way to show off their subversive
power. Despite the reprouval of the papers and the authorities, the Sex Pistols obtained a lucrative
contract with E.M.I. and recorded their first 45 inches, Anarchy in the U.K. (released in November 1976),
which started with the brutal scream "I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist, don't know what I want but I
know how to get it", one of the very few meaningful lyrics in the entire history of rock. The Sex Pistols
prophetised the end of the western civilisation, offering effectively all the emarginated kids a mean of
salvation. The music was an even more accelerated version of the Ramones' punk rock. On every front,
the Sex Pistols meant histery, neurosis, paranoia.

Johnny Rotten did his best to catalyze the anger of the media with a behaviour (authentically) offensive.
The group was a target for trouble after trouble. Within a few days the Sex Pistols were banned from the
radios and from the stages of half of the United Kingdom and the 30th of May 1977 E.M.I. sacked them.
In June the SexPistols signed for A & M. Within nine days even A & M sacked them.

While the first single, despite being boicotted, was in the charts, the band, who had ousted Matlock to
replace him with another yob, a mate of Rotten called Sid "Vicious" Beverly, recorded their second
single, God Save the Queen, outrageous as well as apocalyctic, to coincide with the celebration
for Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee. Despite the total band imposed by outraged patriots, the song,
unveiled on a boat sailing on the Thames during a night party, conquered immediately the number one
spot in the charts.

Pretty Vacant not only repeated the same embarassing climb to the charts, not only implied another
powerful accuse/insult towards the establishment, but it's also a much more musical song, maybe the
best of their career. Although Rotten puts the effort of shouting like an obsessed man and the rest of the
band behaves like a bunch of epylectics, the song has a chorus and a riff. The breathless rhythm
emphasyses in fact its impetus.

The band, 'tho', indifferent to the big sums of money earned during the year, keeps imperversing like rabid
dogs unleashed on the streets of a conservative London which witnesses powerless to the birth of the
barbaric punk.

Their only album, Never Mind The Bollocks (Virgin, 1977), it's a greatest hits of their legendary singles
and other vitriolic gunshot-songs, all based on the frenetic and unconnected singing of the punk prince
Rotten and on a killer rhythm section. A breathless hard rock propels the obscene anthem "Bodies" (with
echoes of Neu's "Hero"), the apocalyptic vision of "Holidays in the Sun", the sarcastic invective on "No
Feelings" and the martial denounce on "New York".

The 14th of January of the following year the Sex Pistols play their last show in that San Francisco which
had been the hippies' stronghold. Then the crisis: as fast as thay imposed themselves to the attention of
the public, the Sex Pistols disintegrated, maybe aware to have been used for petty commercial reasons,
to have entered slowly and be part of that world they hated so ferociously.

The astute McLaren abandons them in time to their destiny. John Lydon,the more intellectual, goes back
to England and builds himself a new career, announcing loudly the corpse of the Sex Pistols' Rotten.
Vicious, already become charismatic symbol of the punk nihilism for having showed an absolute despise
of morals and life in general, a junkie continually on the brink of the final collapse, first knives his girlfriend
to death, then, released on parole, kills himself with an overdose of heroin. In that Sid Vicious, the first
punk martyr, embodies in a way the whole Sex Pistols experience.

The mith of the Sex Pistols goes on and on. Punk rock bands imitating them multiplie in the whole of the
U.K., but maybe nobody manages to express in a such a sincere and radical way the philosophy and the
way of life of punk. As costume phenomenon, the Sex Pistols have been maybe more important than any
other British musician, because they attacked and wounded the British puritanism like none other
phenomenon (not even the '68) managed to achieve.

McLaren put officialy an end to the story with a record and a film-documentary, both called "The Great
Rock and Roll Swindle". With a roguish way, McLaren denounced its own role of instigator and
organizator, even if de-masked at the same timethe abyssal confusion of the kids, all but involved in epic
fights against the establishment, in reality only capable of expressing unleashed instincts without even
trying to justify them. The whole adventure had been a McLaren's astute idea, who had felt
punk's commercial potential, and had simply found a way to bring them to attention using the image and
the costume rather than the music. In a period where american punks were still relegated to anonimity,
the Sex Pistols became news, producing a detonating effect not dissimilar from the one created by the
Rolling Stones.

Johnny Rotten, the band's cathalysing personality and also the least uncouth, was able to appear a mix
between prophet and conspirator, demented and demon. Emblematic in that way was his love/hate
stance towards Dylan and Jagger, of which he represented eventually the latest reincarnation. Vicious
complemented him personifying the Morrison/Hendrix of the situation. Toghether, the two embodied the
cristian myth of the prophet/martyr and applied an enormous influence on the collective imaginary of their
generation.

The Sex Pistols recorded only one album and existed only two years, a proof that their parabolic ascent
was consumed in the sign of the McLuhan's theory of the communications (the means, not the content).

The Sex Pistols were, anyway, a fundamental experience in rock music. With them music got down
another degree in the range of harmony: the Pistols' masterpieces are convoluted banalities, shouted,
nay, exploded, vomited, spitted out. They are the musical equivalent of the perverse violence of the slums
where Rotten and Vicious came from.

The group would reform, with original bassist Glen Matlock, for a series of concerts immortalised on "Filthy
Lucre Live" (Virgin, 1996), which seems a record of a band made up of diligent disciples of The Who and
Chuck Berry. Steve Jones and Jon Lydon now live in California. Jones will go on forming the Neurotic
Outsiders (Maverick, 1996), with two Guns'n' Roses members and Duran Duran's John Taylor.